Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464) was the fabulously wealthy banker who became the leading citizen of Florence in the fifteenth century, and who spent lavishly as the city's most important patron of art and literature. Dale Kent's Cosimo de'Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: the Patron's Oeuvre,(Yale University Press) is exhaustive, full of insight, and liberally illustrated, and is the first comprehensive examination of the whole body of works of art and architecture commissioned by Cosimo and his sons. From the wealth of available documentation illuminating Cosimo de' Medici's life, Ms Kent identifies civic patriotism and devotion as the main themes of his oeuvre, and argues that religious imperatives may well have been more important than political ones in shaping the art for which he was reponsible, and for its reception. Below is the fresco on the east wall of the Medici chapel, in which the chief theme of the decorations is the Journey of the Magi. The chapel frescoes, by Benozzo Gozzoli and completed around 1459, were the culmination of Cosimo's long association with the cult of the Magi. They may be seen as imaging his own spiritual journey as a wealthy and powerful man, who enjoyed great authority in the city, but who in his gifts to the Church made offerings as the Magi did to the Christ child.
On this east fresco, the actual, clearly individuated portraits of the family and their relatives and retainers appear in the cortege following in the train of the young Caspar: Cosimo is in the front rank, mounted on a mule, which could be seen as a symbol of humility, often adopted by abbots and popes, but which family letters record was also an animal members of the de' Medici family rodeon their journeys between Florence and their villas. Cosimo is flanked by his sons Piero, Giovanni and the illegitimate Carlo. The son of Cosimo's Cicassian slave, Carlo is clearly distinguished by his dark skin, and by his exotic features and headdress. Above is the Adoration of the Magi painted around 1440 by Domenico Veneziano, and now in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin. As in the Medici chapel, this representation of the Magi offered an ideal opportunity for the inclusion of portraits of the patron and his friends. In this case the man in black and white at the centre of the group of Magi, standing slightly behind them, as if presenting them to the Holy Family, and to the viewer, portrays Piero de' Medici, the putative patron of the picture. He holds a falcon, his personal emblem and a symbol of the faithful who always return to their heavenly master. In this work the human aspects of the Magi story are emphasised as much as the divine.
Bertie Ahern
An Taoiseach
The year 2000 was another great year for Irish book lovers. publishers and authors. For children, this was the year of Harry Potter. The high points for me included Professor Keith Jeffrey's Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge University Press, £16.95 UK), a scholarly contribution to public understanding of Ireland and the first World War. Professor Jeffrey's book offers a special insight into the Great War and its legacy in 20th-century Ireland, and is a must read for lovers of Irish history. Another great book I enjoyed was Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A History (Ed. Kenneth Milne, Four Courts Press, £30 UK). It seems hard to believe that this book is the first history of one of Dublin's greatest landmarks.
I had the pleasure of launching recently some great new books on Irish sport, including Sean Og O Ceallachain's Greatest Sporting Memories (Calmac Publishing, £9.95) and Jimmy Magee's I Remember it Well (Blackwater Press, £9.99) They both capture a treasure of memories on all aspects of sport at home and abroad. More recent memories of the Olympics are captured in Running to Stand Still by Sonia O'Sullivan (Photographs by Patrick Bolger, text by Tom Humphries, Inpho/ Ark Life Assurance, £24.99 hbk/£14.99 pbk) which contains snapshots and commentary about the Olympic preparations which took Sonia all over the world. All three books remind us of the central role of sport in Irish life and the great contribution made by journalists to public support for our sports men and women. Other interesting books by non-Irish authors included The Lexus and the Olive Tree by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (Farrar Straus Giroux, US$30) which looks at the challenge globalisation poses for traditional values and traditional communities. Similar concerns about the cost of progress for traditional community spirit and neighbourliness are examined in a very readable manner by Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, £17.99 UK)
Adam Sisman
Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task was recently published by Hamish Hamilton at £17.99 UK
Richard Holmes's Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (HarperCollins, £19.99 UK) is a collection of miscellaneous pieces by the master of modern biography: delicious snacks rather than a full meal, perfect for filling those longueurs between the Christmas pudding and the Bond film. I enormously enjoyed Rupert Christiansen's The Visitors: Culture Shock in 19th-Century Britain (Chatto & Windus, £20 UK), a book that is both entertaining and original, and one which, as all good books should, challenges the reader's assumptions about its subject. Christiansen shows us a vibrant, exhilarating, open society in a state of rapid change, quite unlike the drab and repressed stereotype of Victorian Britain. At the time of publication, Martin Amis's autobiographical Experience (Jonathan Cape, £18 UK) elicited much comment about dental tribulations and personal family matters. What struck me most, though, was his serious interest in writing - both in the precise execution of every phrase he uses and in his eye-opening observations about other writers. Nevertheless, given Amis's evident passion for privacy and his determination that the works should speak for themselves, I couldn't help wondering: why did he do it?
Anne Haverty
Anne Haverty's latest novel, The Far Side of a Kiss, is published by Chatto & Windus at £12.99 UK
Philip Roth's The Human Stain (Jonathan Cape, £16.99 UK) is neither subtle nor tender, nor indeed particularly well-crafted - his long heady sentences, incandescent and caustic, can be slapdash - but it has the bracing and challenging quality of a chill breeze in a mild season. An assertive reminder that the Salem syndrome is alive and well in the American, not to say the human, psyche, it's a big and angry book. Comparative newcomer, poet Maurice Riordan's second collection, Floods (Faber and Faber, £7.99 UK), gives a satisfying impression of achievement as well as that of a poet limbering up for the future. From one page to the next, he moves from conventional themes of rural childhood to more metaphysical meditations, from pleasing lyrics to the excitingly formal, always honest and felt.
David Wheatley
[David Wheatley's new collection of poems is Misery Hill (Gallery Press, £9.95)
Richard Murphy's poem "Stone Mania" begins with a description of "how much it hurts" the author to tidy up his scattered papers. Painful or not to assemble, his Collected Poems (Gallery Press, £13.95 pbk) made a long overdue appearance this year. Murphy is probably the only living poet who still gets described as "Anglo-Irish", as though he were a strange and sole survivor from a bygone age. However you want to describe him, this book shows how fully and vitally a part of contemporary Irish poetry he has been. Someone who could beat Richard Murphy for the chaotic state of his papers any day is John Clare. Despite having died in 1864, his complex publishing history meant that until very recently, large amounts of his work remained unpublished. A Champion of the Poor: Political Verse and Prose (Carcanet, £12.95 UK) shows that, far from a spinner of innocent pastorals, Clare was a hard-hitting and angry political satirist. There's even a poem here called "Och by jasus he's an Irish lad" celebrating the abolition of the Beer Tax by that well-known Irishman, the Duke of Wellington.
John Banville
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times. His latest novel, Eclipse is published by Picador at £15.99 UK
One of the oddest, most stimulating and strangely moving books I read this year was Adam Phillips's Darwin's Worms (Faber and Faber, £7.99 UK), a meditation on nothing less than our place in the world, and how a reading of Darwin's last work - on earthworms - might teach us humility and right thinking. More recently, but in a related area, Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Freud (Quartet, £11.99 UK), is a wonderfully sympathetic but clear-eyed reconsideration of Freud's work and legacy. Martin Amis's Experience (Jonathan Cape, £18 UK), a kind of autobiography combined with a memoir of his father, Kingsley, is affecting, revealing, and superbly well written.
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips's most recent book is Prom- ises, Promises (Faber & Faber, £10 UK)
Christopher Bollas's Hysteria (Routledge, £16.99 UK) does for our sense of contemporary sexualities what Laing's Divided Self did for the so-called existential crises of the Sixties. Bollas's style is idiosyncratic; unusually for psychoanalytic writing, his sentences have an idiom and rhythm all of their own, and his is a language worth learning. It shows us, among many other things, that psychoanalysis can still be an opportunity to write and talk about the things that matter most to us. Paul Keegan's The New Penguin Book of English Verse (Penguin, £20 UK) seems like the most interesting anthology of English verse there has ever been. The principles of organisation and selection make so many poems, and their provenance, newly startling. The book includes the reader in such a way that one doesn't have to bother about what has been left out. The generous incisiveness of the preface even allows one to imagine that poetry might be interesting without the grinding of axes.
Brendan Barrington
Brendan Barrington is the editor of The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 1942-1944 (Lilliput, £10) and of The Dublin Review, a new quarterly magazine
Granta books has been reissuing the works of Joseph Roth in fresh translations, and I can only urge you to read all of them. Rebellion (Granta Books, £6.99 UK) a very short novel translated by the estimable Michael Hoffmann, is probably my favourite Roth book. One might attach various adjectives to this postHapsburg fable, but in most cases a countering adjective also applies: it is profound and funny, concentrated and light, strange yet familiar. Does anybody write like this anymore? Has anyone else ever?
Cormac Kinsella
Cormac Kinsella was a member of the `Reading the Future' panel, which chose 12 Irish writers most likely to be read in 2100
My favourite fictions this year were Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann (Phoenix, £9.95 UK) and Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath (Viking, £12.99 UK). McCann's novella and two short stories once again confirm his brilliant powers of storytelling, his great insights into the human condition and his subtle use of language. Patrick McGrath is my favourite English novelist and his latest book is an ambitious historical work that transports the reader through 18thcentury London and the American Revolution while still maintaining the chilly elegance of his previous work. The best memoirs I read were Experience by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, £18 UK) and Stet by Diana Athill (Granta, £12.99 UK). Each book examines opposite parts of the publishing industry. Amis in his moving, exciting and stylish memoir provides great insight into the lives of his father Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, amongst others, as well as presenting his own adventures in the writing world. Diana Athill's description of her life as editor with Andre Deutsch gives the reader a brilliant snapshot into the way publishing used to run.
Emer Martin
Emer Martin's latest novel is More Bread or I'll Appear (Allison & Busby, £7.99 UK)
The Question of Bruno (Penguin £12.99 UK) is the debut of Aleksandar Hemon, a tourist who arrived in the US from Sarajevo in 1992. Rather than return to the besieged city, he stayed in Chicago and wrote this book of stories. Hemon sensibly stayed away from Sarajevo, but we sense his characters' despair, horror and guilt as they sit by the sidelines. Their home cities burn while their new American girlfriends change channels; snipers dog their parents while they argue in sandwich shops over different types of lettuce. Hey Joe, (Allison & Busby, £7.99 UK) is Ben Neihart's lovely book about an engaging, passive teenager who effortlessly slopes through the pages in a quest for parties and sex in New Orleans. At last the Irish novel is going as global as the Irish teenager: Plus Ultra, by Sean Monaghan, (Poolbeg, £6.99) is a fun, fast-paced trek through the seedy, nightmarish world of backpackers in Asia. All are searching desperately for something so unattainable that none can articulate it; what they're going to get is not what they want, but perhaps what they deserve.